Applications of a Modular Interaction Framework for Virtual Reality Testing in a Smart Environment

In the future mobile devices will be used for many different purposes in the Factory of the Future, like displaying user-specific location-aware information about production processes, energy flow and resource consumption. The planning of these challenging future factories requires intuitive interactive virtual testing in an immersive environment prior to the building of the plant. In the EU-funded project uTRUSTit we have developed a Virtual Reality interaction framework designed for testing target group specific intuitive user interfaces on mobile devices in the Internet of Things. This developed framework also enables us now to carry out interactive VR application scenarios in the context of the Factory of the Future. In this paper we will describe the requirements and developed functionalities of our framework. We will outline how the framework design and implementation can be adapted, using two exemplary Factory of the Future scenarios; first as an interaction device in an immersive environment for pre-building verification in industrial plant construction it supports extended toolsets; second as an immersive usability test environment that allows testing the reaction of user groups to interface elements depending on location and reaction.